


Static in the Signal

by alp



Series: Vibrations [2]
Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Action & Romance, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Espionage, Established Relationship, F/M, POV Alternating, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2018-09-21
Packaged: 2018-11-09 16:02:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 19,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11107986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alp/pseuds/alp
Summary: The Alliance has been infiltrated. On Hoth, able to trust only one another, Jyn and Cassian race to uncover the mole.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Due to IRL stuff, this took much longer to get up than I thought it would. And, well, said IRL stuff is ongoing, so I expect to be slower with updates than I was with 'Echoes.'
> 
> But. It's in my head, and I wanted to do it, so here's the start.
> 
> Hope you like it. :)

The corridors of Echo Base were busy and cramped, more so than those of Yavin 4. It wasn’t that there were more personnel, or that the passages were more narrow; on the contrary, the opposite was true. Echo was a work in progress. Half-built, half-ready. The Alliance had pushed itself. Divisions had blurred; sentients had undertaken tasks normally designated to droids. Cassian had spent more hours than he cared to scraping out tunnels, and still, there was more to be done. The base was functional, and as secure as could currently be hoped for, but it was nowhere near proper headquarter status. 

He hated it. He hated the hand he’d had in creating it.

Snowflakes, riding on gusts in the hangar, clung to his beard and eyelashes. His lower back ached. It had been fine, mostly, when he’d been on his ship, but now it was a pulsing throb, heightened by the cold. There was a sensation, to the left of his spine, as if something were clicking, sliding. He felt it often. His entire hip was not quite right. He tried not to think about it. He’d try not to for as long he could manage.

He passed a contingent of droids, threading wires through a length of pipe, easing them through a hole in the wall. Sparks fanned outward, struck metal, burned hot and bright before vanishing. His nose stung. A humanoid model with a black chassis spared him a glance. It wasn’t the same face, or the same body, and it hadn’t been manufactured for the same purpose, but still, there was a closing in, a pressure on his lungs, a thickness in his throat. He shoved it back into the same place he put his pain.

A group of pilots walked toward him, on the opposite side of the corridor. They were animated, chatting, smiling. The one on the outside struck his shoulder. She looked back. Her cheeks and forehead were framed by stray curls.

“Sorry.”

He was pretty sure she didn’t know him, but he knew her. He knew everyone.  _ Shara Bey _ . He gave her a nod. She blinked, nodded back. His fingers twitched toward his coat pockets. It was an old reflex. 

CIC, when he reached it, was a cold, noisy mess. Divisions were on top of one another. The lighting was utilitarian. He walked past clusters of operators, past soldiers and  commanders conferring; past screens, transparent save for the glowing outlines of maps. He was used to debriefing in confined spaces -- or, at least, in mostly private ones. Having to meet the General out here made the back of his neck itch. But there wasn’t much to be done for it, unless everyone in Intelligence started meeting in special quarters, and that would telecast more than they were willing. 

Draven sat at a desk in a corner. He was leaning back, frowning at a datapad. The space around him was dark.

He looked up. His eyes shifted, taking Cassian in. He straightened. “Captain.”

Cassian saluted.

“At ease.” Draven folded his hands over his lap. “Report.”

Cassian’s stance widened. “I abandoned the objective. Imperials had already established a presence.”

Draven frowned. “It took you five standard days to come to that conclusion?”

“No, sir.” He felt a familiar prickle, where his neck joined to his skull. He breathed. His features held still. “I delayed to ensure I hadn’t been followed.”

“You had no opportunity to send a message?”

The prickling spread, over his shoulders and upper back. “It didn’t seem prudent, sir, no.” He was used to lying. He did it all the time. But he had only once before lied to the man sitting in front of him. It was necessary. It was right. Habit made it feel wrong, and experience made it feel dangerous, in a way that few of his gambits had.

Draven regarded him for a long moment, then sighed, planted his elbow on the arm of his chair, ran his forefinger along the skin between his upper lip and nose. “You’re certain there’s nothing that could be done? No way to dislodge them?”

“Not without drawing undue attention.”

There was a pause. The air was filled with the chatter of nearby operators, hushed and indistinct; with indicators beeping, their songs overlapping and bleeding into one another. Cassian was good at what he did -- brilliant, if he was to take the word of a certain woman in his life -- and he took precautions, and in twenty years, and even as a child, and even when his fear had all but run him and his heart had beat so loud that he’d been sure everyone could hear, he’d never been caught, apart from on Jedha. 

He’d barely begun to play this game, and already he felt the whisper of a noose.

Draven rose. “Walk with me.”

They moved toward the rear of CIC. Draven led them down a small passage. Their shoulders brushed. “You know why you’re being given these assignments.”

He gritted his teeth. Of course he knew. He knew why he was no longer being sent to recruit, why other agents were landing undercover missions, why he was spending his time scouting and acquiring supplies. The things he was doing were important things, useful things, but they were also, to a certain extent, unsuited to him. He’d said it to Jyn, in so many words: punishment, fancied up in accolades. “Sir.”

“Your saving grace is that you’ve continued to get results. But make no mistake: we’re in no position to tolerate sloppiness or insubordination.” He stopped. His gaze swept back and forth, along the passage. It was clear, save for the two of them, but he stepped closer, nonetheless. “This isn’t the first instance lately where the Empire has been ahead of us. If there’s a reason for the pattern, then we need to find it.”

Cassian looked up. His hands were behind his back, resting at the spot where the soreness began, the thumb and forefinger of one hand wrapped around the wrist of the other. His heart fluttered. He waited.

“I want you to look into it. No one else is to know.”

Well, that was going to be a problem.

“Consider this the next step in regaining our full trust. If it goes well, we’ll look at returning Albarrio to you.” Draven tilted his head back. He was tall enough to look down at Cassian naturally; the gesture heightened the effect. “You’ve been one of our better agents, Andor. Don’t disappoint me.”

Cassian replied with a single, tight nod, lips drawn downward, brow relaxed. Draven’s eyes ran up and down his face. His lips thinned. 

“Dismissed,” he muttered, and turned and headed off, back toward CIC.

Cassian stared after him. His mind ran laps. His heart wasn’t racing, not exactly, but it was beating faster, and a thread of nervous heat was working its way through his core. Alliance Intelligence wasn’t stupid; it wasn’t surprising that they’d noticed something, or that they’d started to suspect what he already knew. But he hadn’t expected to be made aware of that suspicion, at least not so soon. It might be a good thing. It might also be very, very bad.

At least a full minute passed before he moved, walking in the opposite direction of the General, following the passage to its end. It emptied into a lesser-used corridor. Darker than the others, colder, walls and floor left rough. It took him a moment to orient himself. He wondered if they knew something. He wondered if someone had seen, or heard. He could be more open, now, if he wanted, and that would give him access to more channels, but part of why he hadn’t sought them in the first place was because he couldn’t be sure about them. And then, of course, there was Jyn. It would make things harder for her, if they were monitoring him on this. 

_ Shit _ . 

His quarters were on the edge of the South Passage. Despite the marks against him, he was still a Captain, and that entitled him to a private room. It was small -- four meters long and two and a half wide -- and the heating was as unreliable as on the rest of the base, but he needed it, these days, and was grateful for it. He took off his coat. Sat on the edge of his bunk, ran his hands over his face, settled his thumbs under his chin, his forefingers on either side of his nose. He needed a shave. He needed to talk to his contact. He needed to know whether he could still trust him. The thought came, speeding along tracks laid a lifetime ago, that he might have to neutralize him.

_ Call it what it is, Andor: killing. _

He forced it away. 

There was a rap at the door. His hands fell, wrists landing on his knees, fingers dangling between them. He flooded with irritation. He didn’t want to be bothered. He wanted to sift through his thoughts, pick at this new assignment, this new potential problem, until sleep rolled over him and dragged him under. The rap came again. He squeezed his eyes shut, took a long breath, and rose.

He leaned against the door. His voice was pitched low. “Who’s there?”

“Sergeant Erso,” the visitor said, the rank sounding strange and forced.

He felt a jolt in his gut. The irritation fled. He straightened and palmed the panel beside the door, movements jerky with urgency. She was standing with her arms folded across her chest, shifting from one foot to the other. Radiating with that constant, hair-trigger energy, that livewire buzz that made her mere presence loud. Her cheeks were pink from the cold. Her hair was crusted and shiny with frost. She didn’t smile when they made eye contact, but her features softened.

“Captain.” There were other people moving about. “I heard you were back.”

Of course she had. He’d have known the exact moment she returned, were their positions reversed.

“There’s something I’d like to ask you. One of the scouts said you’d probably know.” She jutted her chin toward his quarters. “Do you mind?”

“No.” He wondered if they were really fooling anyone. He suspected that they weren’t. The calculating part of him thought it might be useful: sleeping together as a cover for conspiring. Then again, they already had a reputation for the latter.  _ What am I going to do _ ? “Please.” He stepped to the side, allowing her to pass. They didn’t touch. The door closed, and still, they didn’t touch. For a long moment, they didn’t even speak.

He hadn’t seen her in five standard days. He was aching from it, powerfully, all over, and yet he just stood there, looking at her. He felt awkward. He couldn’t imagine why; there was no reason for him to, after everything that had passed between them. But it was all so new, and he wasn’t sure what normal was, and he had a feeling that she didn’t know, either. They were making it up as they went.

Were they watching her? Had they spoken to her, too?

“So,” she said, at last. There was a ledge carved into the wall above the foot of his bunk. She placed her blaster and truncheon there, beside his own weapons. “How’d it go?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, breathed through his nose. Walked past her. He couldn’t be near the door when he started talking. Neither of them could. He leaned against the desk opposite his bunk, curling his fingers under the lip and crossing his legs at the ankles. “I’m not sure if ‘well’ is the right word.” He’d wanted to avoid being followed, it was true. It made sense to take the long way home. But it hadn’t been the only reason. He’d made a stop, along the way, off the record. “I was able to find out how Telara had been turned.” He paused. “They took his family. They told him they’d kill them, one by one, and record it.”

He let the implication sink in. Her jaw and shoulders tightened. Her eyes dropped.

“Wish I could say that was surprising.” She said it softly. “Did they not know who he was, until recently?”

“I don’t think that they did, no.”

“But all those years...”

He nodded. She was so close to him. He could tap her leg, if he moved his foot a hair. He could take her hand, if he pushed himself forward and reached out. His thoughts skittered back and forth. They had to talk about this, about all of it. There were things that needed doing. The mission didn’t stop being the mission just because he’d missed her. “I know. It might have been that his luck ran out; that’s the way it is with informants. He might also have been deliberately compromised.” It would fit. It would make sense. He was almost certain it was what had happened. “But I wasn’t able to determine that. There wasn’t the time.”

Her hands moved to to her lower back; her shoulders tugged at her snow-colored thermal coat. It was ill-fitting. He wanted her to take it off. “So that’s it.”

“For that, yes. For now.”

He could tell she was gritting her teeth. “It’s not a whole lot.”

“No,” he admitted. He’d have liked to have gotten more out of it, himself. He might have, if he’d thought he could get away with a longer delay. But the speculation, the direction of it -- that was a piece. There’d been times when he’d unraveled entire plots from less. “But it’s something more than we had before.”

Silence fell for a moment. There was a rumble beneath their feet, followed by a long, low groan. The shield doors were closing. She took a few steps toward him. “How, uh.” Her throat worked. “How are you?”

“I’m fine.” She was trying to change the subject. “There’s something else.” Would she expect it? Did she already know? He wanted to grab her waist and pull her to him. 

Her gaze roved over his face. “What?”

“Draven,” he said. “He knows something’s off. He’s asked me to look into it.”

“Are we in trouble, then?”

“More so than usual, you mean?” He found himself uncrossing his ankles, standing up, moving to meet her. His hip popped. He grimaced. “I don’t know yet.”  _ I don’t know if I can keep you safe _ . And he wanted to. He’d been wanting to since before he’d even realized that that was what was driving him. There was hardly any space left between them. Her fingers brushed against his. The air was cold. He ran hot. “What about you? Anything?” He touched her hair, her face, her neck. His blood was rushing, pooling. 

“Nothing new.” She took his hand. Her fingers wove between his and flared outwards. “Cassian, I’m serious.”

He sighed. “What do you want me to say?” He ran his thumb along her jawline. “I really don’t know.” Thoughts of duty were fading.

She clicked her tongue and shook her head. Her lips, however, were curving upwards. She placed her hand on his hip, passed it around to his back. Pressed her fingers into his flesh. “You should get this checked out, you know.”

She’d noticed. It wouldn’t have been her if she hadn’t. “No need,” he said. 

“Hypocrite.”

He smiled at her. He couldn’t reach her knee, but he wrapped an arm around her waist, and drew her to where it touched his own. “That was different.”

“No, it wasn’t.” Her voice had gotten very quiet. Her words were captured by his breath. “You’re being stubborn.”

He sniffed. Their foreheads touched. He splayed his hands over the small of her back; she wrapped one of hers around the back of his neck. His chest was swelling. “How have you been? Really?”

“Bored.” It was half a chuckle. She tilted her head upwards. Her nose brushed his. 

“That’s a shame,” he murmured against her lips. In truth, he was relieved. It meant nothing had happened, at least not to her. She leaned up and into him, whispered something he couldn’t make out, and then kissed him. Her lips were cold, at first; an artifact of Hoth, and all its unpleasantness. Friction warmed them. He held her fast. He kneaded her hip, her rear, and slipped one hand up, behind her head, under her bun, through her hair. She gripped his neck. Cupped his cheek. Hooked a thumb under his belt. Their movements were slow, languid. Their kiss was at once deep and raw and delicate.

He’d missed her. He couldn’t believe how much he’d missed her. He trembled from the force of it. He broke away and buried his face in her neck and shoulder. “Jyn.”

“What?”

She kissed his jaw, his neck. One of her hands moved over his abdomen and slid upward. He pressed his lips and tongue to her neck. Her body rolled against his. He planted his palm between her shoulder blades, and let himself roll back.

“You’re staying?”

Her fingers dug into his shirt. Her thumbs moved downward, then back up, bunching the fabric. It was coming out from his trousers. It would be cold, but it would be worth it, as it had been, for the past month.

“Of course,” she replied, tone heavy and rough.

He walked her backwards, toward his bunk. He fumbled for the buttons on her coat. Her hands covered his, helped him. She caught his bottom lip between her teeth and tugged, and he let her pull him, increased the pressure on the back of her head, sucked on her tongue, and pulled her right back. A gasp, sharp and sweet, rose out of her and landed in his mouth. Fire lapped at his spine.

Would they see? Would they try to take her from him? She already knew things that, as it turned out, she wasn’t supposed to know. He'd just been told that no one could be a part of it. She was already a part of it. He couldn’t not have her be a part of it. Strange, how his loyalty had shifted.

He’d never done this before. 

She grabbed him, and moved in  _ some way _ , and he was on his back. Her thighs were around his midsection. He squeezed them.

It was hard to think.

He wished he couldn't think at all. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took so long, y'all.

The alarm was the shattered echo of a memory.

Jyn’s stomach lurched. Her muscles flexed, preparing. She pushed herself up. The air was cold. The bed was hard, but softer than she was used to. Her mind clawed at orientation, for a where, a when. Abyssissa? Were they back there? How many years had it been? She’d bunked on the ground, the last time, tucked into a corner, behind a Togruta woman who’d taken a liking to her. She groped for a name.

_ Damat. _

Damat had died two months later, clutching an unstable detonator. 

The tone of the siren was different. The pitch was lower, and there was a strobe attached to it. Who was in charge of the perimeter? She squinted. The wall and door ahead of her came into view, then vanished again. Her hand moved under the blankets, grasping, searching. Blaster. Vibroblade. One or the other, had to be close.

Her knuckles brushed against skin. A body shifted, sat up beside her. She started.

“Dammit.”

A man’s voice. He turned, and the mattress dipped beneath him, just enough for her to feel it. His arm swept between them and back, toward a wall and a panel. Before the light went on, she was able to make out the lines of his chest, the curve of his bicep and shoulder.

She blinked and breathed.

Her first thought:  _ Saw is going to kill me.  _ Her second:  _ Cassian. _

_ Oh. _

Hoth.

He hurried down the bed, to its end, throwing off the covers. His knee, bent outwards, struck her bare thigh, dragged along it, ran over her own knee. In the lingering confusion of her waking, the contact was a bright flash of clarity. She swallowed, swung her legs toward the floor, reached up to gather her hair, push it back into its bun. The ground was cold and hard beneath her feet. She scanned it for her clothes, and reached for her underthings, her trousers.

Her eyes moved to Cassian. He was yanking up his own trousers, securing them around his waist. The muscles of his back rippled beneath his skin, beneath the long scar that followed the lower half of his spine, puckered and purple and still angry, a month after he’d earned it. There were other scars, white with age. There were ten red lines -- five running over one shoulder blade, five beneath the other -- fresh, but already fading. She thought of the weight of him, pressing into her. His breath on her neck, gasps in her ear. The way he looked when he was beneath her, eyes cloudy, lips parted. Her stomach lurched again. It would have been nice to wake him under different circumstances, before she had to leave. The time between had felt very, very long. She’d managed to make it through six years of being mostly alone, and now she could barely stand five days of it.

She needed more to do. Too much desk work was bad for the brain.

A rumble shimmied up through the balls of her feet. The PA system crackled. “Breach at South Passage, L1. General quarters.” There was a sound like static, a spark and a sizzle. The lights flickered and died. For a moment, Cassian’s back, and the wall and door, flashed black and red. A rising hum filled the room, and a dim off-white glow followed.

She watched him tug his overshirt down and tuck it into his trousers. “Shame about your quarters,” she said. They were near the faulty generator, nearer than any of the other officers’ at or above his rank. Everything was ad hoc. Everything was in progress. Still, he deserved better.

He made a noise, in the back of his throat. He bent toward the floor. His hair fell into his face. “And yet, here you are, instead of in your own.”

She half-smiled. “I don’t like my bunk mates.” It wasn’t totally true. They were fine enough, as people went. But for all that they were Alliance, and for all that she shouldn’t have had to worry, habit still demanded that she put her back up when sleeping around them. With Cassian, she slept better than she had in over a decade.

Somewhere in the back of her head, a familiar voice was screaming.

He smirked. “Right.” He tossed her shirt to her. She snatched it from the air. “It is what it is. We’re working on it. And in the meantime, we deal with it.” He reached for his parka. “It’s a short walk, at least, when something goes wrong.”

She shrugged into her own coat. She was trembling. The warmth of the bed, and of his body, had clung to her skin for a few moments, but it was gone, now. The room was colder than it should have been; the heater had to have been off for at least half an hour. She moved toward him. She wanted to drag him back under the covers.

He handed her weapons to her, then reached for his commlink. “Are you set?”

She hesitated. There was a weight, suddenly, tugging on her legs, rooting her in place. There were people moving, outside. Boots slapping, voices rising. There would be. Of course there would be. And there’d be no avoiding them, or the glaring implications of she and Cassian leaving his room, together, in the middle of the night.

They hadn’t tried very hard, all things considered, to keep things discreet. They’d still played at it enough to gain some plausible deniability. On all the other nights she’d stayed with him -- nearly every night their shifts happened to align -- she’d taken care to rise before him, leave ahead of him, slip between passers-by. For every other emergency, she’d responded from her own quarters. After this, they’d be hard-pressed to deny anyone who had suspicions.

He blinked at her. “What is it?”

She thought of what it might mean for him, and felt pressure build at the base of her skull and in the back of her throat. It had been easy not to think about it earlier, when she’d been focused on the fact that he was back, and that he was all right, and that her body was thrumming with need. Now, with no distractions to ward it off, the bit of worry she’d felt when they’d talked began to grow.

Would it be harder, now? Would they have to see less of each other? Would he get used to that? They hadn’t known each other very long.

_ He stays. He comes back. _

She looked away from him, checked her blaster. There wasn’t anything to be done for it; they couldn’t very well decline to secure the base. “Nothing.” She took a step, put a hand on his arm, and tilted her chin toward the door. “Let’s go.”

His gaze bounced down, then back up. She saw his forehead crease. It was tangible, the sense of him trying to read her, of trying to decide whether to say what he was thinking. She made eye contact and held it. After a beat, he nodded once, twice, touched the small of her back. His fingers dragged along her waist and hip, and then he turned, and the door hissed.

The corridor was dark. The back-up lights cast soft, narrow beams, evenly-spaced pockets of yellow carving through swathes of shadow. The temperature difference was immediately, uncomfortably noticeable; Cassian’s quarters may have been cold, but they’d still been holding back the worst of it. Her breath frosted. Her cheeks stung. A stream of personnel jogged past them, clutching pistols and rifles. A sapper, belt strung with grenades, noticed Cassian and tipped his head.

The alarm sang. The call for general quarters repeated. They started moving.

Cassian lifted his comm and identified himself. Jyn’s own was in her coat pocket. She curled her fingers around it, through the fabric. In her section of the base, there were two other NCOs who were more than capable of handling the general quarters call, and no one would begrudge her responding to the site of the emergency. She left it where it was. 

Crackling, in Cassian’s palm. He spoke again. “Status?”

She couldn’t hear the reply. The alarm was too loud.

Somewhere up ahead, metal screeched. There came the echo of blaster fire, reverberating back and forth and wrapping around them. Jyn heard a roar, and then another. Hoth was a frozen wasteland. There was no evidence, as far as she and Cassian and everyone else had been able to tell, that anyone had ever settled there. But it still had...fauna, some of it the kind that existed solely to make life more difficult for everything else. They’d been dealing with it since the start. The base was a beacon -- a massive, pulsing shelter, filled with food. When the shield doors had been finished, the attacks had slackened, but they hadn’t let up. They probably never would, even after the last generator had been stabilized.

It was better, at least, than having the Empire descend upon them, and it sure broke up the monotony.

He edged closer to her, angling his body so that it curled halfway around her, so that her shoulder struck his front. “Three of them so far; one is down. There may be two or three more out of sight.”

“They can’t be locked down?” That was the usual approach.

He shook his head. “Not from what Voya told me, no. We have to get past them to repair the shield and generator.”

That meant it was worse than usual.

It was hard to tell, in the tunnels, exactly where sounds were coming from. The curvature of the walls and ceiling bent and threw them, made them misbehave. Despite that, it was clear she and Cassian were nearing the action, if for no other reason than that the din had grown louder.

“Have they managed to get anyone through?” she asked.

“She didn’t say.” He gave her a look. “She might have been a bit preoccupied.”

“I’ll bet.”

They rounded a bend, and came up on the back end of the staging area. Men and women spoke quietly, checked weapons and gear, waited, half lost in shadow. From up ahead, there came another smattering of blaster fire; light dappled the soldiers, the walls, and then faded. Something thumped.

A woman hurried toward them, stepped into a pool of yellow-orange. She was a few inches taller than Jyn. Broader in the shoulders. “Captain.”

He acknowledged her. “Sergeant Aldes.”

No salutes. The Alliance was inconsistent with its formalities, Jyn had noticed. That was fine; the cadre had been, as well, more often than not.

She turned to regard Jyn. They’d shared work detail together, once, and spoken twice outside of that. It had been cordial enough. Her expression was hard to make out. “Erso?”

Jyn breathed. “I was in the area.”

Aldes’ gaze shifted from her, to Cassian, and back again. The silence stretched.

“Is there a problem?” His tone was curt.

“No,” Voya said. Her gaze slid back to Jyn. She shrugged. “The more the merrier.” She gestured, indicating a point further down the corridor, and the three of them moved together. “We dealt with the other two while you were on your way, but we were right about there being more. They’re in the tunnel that leads to the generator.” She shook her head. “Not used to there being so many at once.”

“Have you been able to start repairs at all?” Jyn asked.

“Not yet.” Voya looked back over her shoulder. “Was about to make a push. We have the numbers for it, now.”

Cassian tapped her arm and stepped ahead. “I want to have a look.” The tunnel curled off to the left. At its top was an intersecting pass, its mouth bracketed by soldiers. A cluster of mouse droids rested just beyond them, at the start of another curve. The alarm strobed, and painted them in rolling waves of red.

Jyn found herself moving up with Cassian, keeping pace with him. It was natural,  _ right _ , how they’d always worked together. Voya hung back, just a bit, and Jyn felt a knot begin to form in her chest. Soldiers moved aside. Cassian tucked himself against a wall, peered around its corner. He turned back, inclined his head toward Jyn, made space for her.

There were three large corpses on the floor, fronts gray and smoking, one of them lying less than a meter from their vantage point. She couldn’t see the live ones, but she could hear them, scraping and breathing and braying, the sound and sense of them overriding all else. The air smelled of smoke, ozone, and snow. It was a blessing of the cold that it didn’t yet smell of dead things.

She considered the hostiles, considered the width of the corridor. No way to flank them, save from outside the base, and no one would be foolish enough to drop the shield doors for this. Her eyes found a bit of wiring, a hung of metal. Parts swung outward from there, in an uneven arc. She followed them back, inward, wondering whether the poor droid had malfunctioned, or been sent on purpose. Something caught her attention. She knocked her shoulder into Cassian’s.

“That passage, there. On the side.” It was narrow. Fine for a humanoid, or something smaller; not so for a wampa.

He caught her eye, gave her a nod, and turned back. “Voya, how were you planning to approach?”

“Straight on.” She clicked her tongue. “They’re animals.”

He sniffed. “Entire sections of the base have been closed over them,” he said. “Animals or not, we take them seriously.” He paused. Jyn watched his shoulders shift, watched his throat work, watched his jaw change its set. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.” He gestured to her. “Jyn, you take a few men and some mice and get to that passage. Voya, when they’re in position, we draw out the hostiles. Jyn’s team will move in behind them and start patching the breach and generator.”

Jyn nodded. It might be a bit much, but it was sound.

He began assigning her team. She noticed the sapper from earlier. “If all goes well,” Cassian said, “you should see minimal combat.”

A flurry of nerves, incongruous. She frowned. “Minimal combat?” A chuckle escaped her. A notion crept up and into her head. “Cassian, you’re not…” Voya was watching them. The knot in Jyn’s chest tightened. “...worried, are you?” She didn’t say “about me.” There was no need.

He didn’t look at her. He didn’t look at her in the exact same way that he didn’t look at her whenever he was touching down on the wrong side of honest. Instead, he busied himself with his rifle. “No. You’re the right person for the job.”

Blood rushed to her head. Her pulse pounded in her ears. They weren’t like this. He had her back, but not like  _ this _ . “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”

He did look at her, then. And there was that blank look, and at the corners of his mouth, a tugging, enough for her to know that he was struggling with some manner of tension. “What did you mean?”

She was very, very aware of Voya. She burned to be forthright, but there was an itch between her shoulder blades, and ice at the base of her spine. It was natural to work  _ with _ him, not  _ under _ him, but it wasn’t just the two of them now, and he outranked her, and they were doing several things in their downtime that could screw them, and goodness, she shouldn’t have had a problem following ranks, especially when he seemed to be trying so hard to not give anything away.

In her peripheral vision, Voya shifted her weight. Jyn swallowed. She knew very well how some people felt about her, even after what she’d done. A part of her understood it; another, louder part of her smoldered from it. Voya hadn’t seemed to be one of them. She wondered which would be better: raising eyebrows because she was  _ Jyn Erso _ , or because she was a sergeant bedding a captain. Under any other circumstances, she wouldn’t have given two shits.

“It’s not important.” She bit off the ends of the words. His eyes softened, and his shoulders sagged.

“I trust you to handle it. That’s why I’m sending you.” His tone had changed. His voice was pitched lower. She stared at him for a moment. Didn’t speak. Turned to join her group.

She’d never done this before.

“Which one of you knows the best route?” The words came out harsher than she meant them.

They moved. It was convoluted, their path, and longer than she would have liked, but she could believe there was nothing to be done for it. The Alliance had taken advantage of naturally occurring caves, at this end of Echo, and exploited the network of passages connecting them. At some points, they’d carved out their own connectors, but time had so far limited them. And, as frustrating as the maze could be for them, it would be even more so for their enemies. She reminded herself of that as they wound their way through, as the texture of the floor changed, as ice slid under their boots, as time seemed to stretch beyond what was reasonable. There could be more wampa getting in. The ones already there could be advancing. It was getting colder. They were moving fast, but the chill was seeping under her collar.

Cassian was putting himself in harm’s way, and trying to keep her out of it. All well and good, for him to go and make it about his confidence in her, but a weight was still pressing down on her chest, and anger was still burning in her belly.

The corridor opened up, emptying into a high-ceilinged cavern ringed by intersections. Footfalls, hard and fast, approaching from the left. Jyn sought her weapon on instinct. A man emerged. He saw her, and the others, and came up short, halting beneath one of the back-up tubes. His breaths were condensed puffs of vapor.

She narrowed her eyes.  _ Straggler. _ She wasn’t a hundred percent on this part of the base, but she knew there were supply and maintenance and storage rooms, in the direction he’d come from. A person who landed the wrong overnight shift could wind up there. How long had it been since the alarm had gone off?

“Soldier.” The tone of her own voice was surreal to her. She was right back into it, as if she’d never stopped soldiering. It would have been worse, if she’d been in her assigned quarters, and had found herself organizing personnel. It was worse every time the call went up.

“Sir.” He was gawky. And young -- younger than herself, she wagered, by a couple of years. She thought she’d seen him before, in CIC. An operator, maybe. It occurred to her that she ought to be making it her business to know everyone.

He blinked. “Sorry.” He sounded Coruscanti. “I was…”

“It doesn’t matter.” She could guess: a kid, on an overnight, working alone? He’d probably fallen asleep. She didn’t have time for it, either way. She cocked her head in the direction of the staging area, began backing away. “You’ve heard the message; you know where you need to be. Report to Captain Andor.” Another instance of the surreal.

He hesitated.

“Well? Go!”

He gathered himself. “Sorry. Yes, sir.” He stayed a beat longer, and then jogged off. She was glad that, like everyone else she’d encountered since this had started, he hadn’t bothered to salute.

She turned to her lead.

He tilted the barrel of his blaster. “This way,” he said, indicating the branch directly opposite the one they’d come from. She inclined her head toward him, then hurried after. The end of the passage was a triangle with a narrow top, its edges rounded but uneven, blackish blue in the dim light. It was too far, and too dark, to make out anything past it, but she thought she detected movement. Her hands and fingers flashed --  _ slow, quiet. _ Her team obeyed, and then began to arrange themselves at the end. Mouse droids, buzzing, zipped past her feet.

She dug her commlink out of her pocket. She felt her jaw tighten. “Cassian. Come in.”

There was a pause. “Jyn. I read you.”

“We’re in position.”

“Good.” There was a scuffling sound in the background. “We’re going to provoke them now. I’ll radio when you’re clear to move.”

Her free hand curled around her pistol. Her heart thumped.

Blaster fire. Short bursts. There was a roar, and a cry went up. She felt them, beneath her feet. Another burst. And another. A flash of white. Towering bodies, hunched over and moving, pawing at the ground. The edges of the comm dug into her palm. She was mad at him. Fear gnawed at her stomach, and that feeling, too, was directed at him.

Cassian Andor was an asshole.

More shouts. She glanced across the way, at the sapper, at his grenades. She almost asked him for one.

Cassian’s voice drifted up to her. “Jyn! Go!”

They went.

* * *

The communications section of ops was on the far side of CIC, separated from the alcove that functioned as the war room by a natural partial wall. It was dark. The faces of Jyn’s fellows were bathed in monitor light, surrounded by deep blue. 

She pressed her fingers to the side of her headset. Her head buzzed with ambient noise. Only a few hours had passed since the general quarters call. She had long since been drained of adrenaline, but its effects lingered, manifesting as a tingling in her muscles, and a tension in her upper back. Restlessness. She was restless often, these days.

She hadn’t been intel, when she’d been with the Partisans. Oh, she’d cased outposts and hangars and manufactories and the occasional base, when she’d been old enough, and she’d had some radio training, and a general education in cryptography -- useful skills, all, for any guerilla. But once she’d stopped being small enough to squeeze into tight spots, Saw had preferred to have her in more...immediate roles, and to task others with gathering information. She hadn’t envied them, especially in later years. When things went wrong, they were the first people he suspected.

She wasn’t used to this. She wasn’t used to the amount of  _ sitting _ that she had to do, sifting through reports, slotting the puzzle pieces of far-flung transmissions into something resembling a larger whole. When she’d first been tapped to intercept (a job she hadn’t expected to land for months, given the clearance required, and one she wouldn’t have been given, had it not been for the collapse of a particular tunnel) she’d thought it might be a good change of pace. It wasn’t.

And it made it harder for her to help Cassian.

Her access to Alliance records had its limits, but there were still things that she could do. After Scarif, to replenish its personnel, Yavin 4 had drawn heavily from outposts and satellite bases. It would have taken too much time to study each newcomer, and Cassian would have risked drawing attention to himself by doing all the legwork. So, she’d been narrowing down the possibilities by studying the bases and outposts themselves, identifying any that’d had an unusual amount of incidents. Some had. But she hadn’t exhausted the list just yet, and every moment spent chained to a transponder was a moment she couldn’t spend on further research, and a moment spent watching the chrono tick further down.

She breathed, long and slow. Her team had patched the site of the compromise, aiming for speed, staving off further intrusion until more delicate droids and proficient techs could move in. Cassian was walking into the tunnel as she was leaving it. She’d wanted to talk to him, argue with him. She’d ached to talk to him. There was a moment, when she might have, but he wasn’t going to be open with her, then and there, and she knew it. 

Instead: “good work.” And then, stepping closer: “2030?”

She’d raised her chin “If I can.” He’d swallowed.

It was confusing, being involved with someone in this way. It had seemed a damn lot less complicated, in the cockpit and bunk of their recon ship, and post-Scarif, and  _ on _ Scarif, and even before that, when she’d thought she might hate him more than she liked him. How could she wake up wanting to kriff a guy, and then want to deck him less than an hour later, for something that she knew,  _ she knew _ , made sense? How could she be angry, but also worry, and want to see him, because lately she hadn’t seen enough of him?

In the back of her mind, a voice whispered that people left, when they no longer found her useful.

_ He stays. _

A vein of static ran through the band. She adjusted a dial. The woman next to her coughed. Her next patrol shift was soon. She longed for it. Cold as it would be, a nice, long trek around the perimeter would do wonders for her head.

She frowned. They didn’t retain recordings indefinitely, for obvious reasons; they held them just long enough to give their limited personnel a chance to be thorough. She’d been walking back through the morning, through hours of empty audio that had already declared its emptiness to another set of ears. But some messages, of course, were silent by nature. It was easy to miss -- a brief flash of light, in the corner of her screen, lost in a sea of identical blips.

She shifted. The transmission had originated on Hoth. Duration was less than a second. The captured information was encoded, as would be expected, and she didn’t recognize the code, which was also expected.

What was unexpected was the timestamp.

She leaned back. The nape of her neck prickled. 

“Huh.”

It had been sent during the breach.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...annnnd sorry again because this chapter is basically GLARING RELATIONSHIP/SELF-ESTEEM ISSUES AHHHH


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm super sorry for how long this took. Life is dumb.

Cassian paused beside a door, in front of a vent, air spilling over his calves and feet. It wasn’t warm, exactly, but it was  _ less cold _ . It soothed the ache in his hip. 

He was in a more stable part of the base. Deeper in, set back. The rock was different -- older, harder. There were no incursions here; there couldn’t be, and there were very few failures, and so it held its less-coldness in a way that other sections didn’t. During those times when he was in a particular mood, he’d lament that CIC and the war room weren’t located there, despite knowing exactly why they weren’t. It was ironic. One would think, given where he’d grown up, that he wouldn’t have a problem with the cold. And one would, of course, be missing the point.

He fingered his comm. The message had come shortly before he’d finished up at the breach and, under Voya’s eye, left the techs and engineers to their work. Sooner than he’d expected, if he was being honest, and sooner than he’d have reached out, himself, even with the eagerness he’d felt the night before. Easier to draw connections, if the gap in time wasn’t wide enough. And yet, here he was.

He swept his palm over a panel. The door snapped into its pocket, and spat out a rectangle of light. He glanced at his wrist. Fifteen minutes. It would be enough, most likely. In truth, there was more time than that available to him, and he could push it, and few would question it. But it wasn’t the possibility of being questioned that concerned him. Anyone watching in a serious way wouldn’t bother.

There had been many times, over the course of his career, when the amount of leeway he’d been given was as much liability as asset. It always felt strange, but this time around, it was on a whole other level. He resisted the urge to check his sidearm. He thought of Jyn.

_ Jyn _ . The look on her face, the tone of her voice. He hadn’t expected that. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected at all -- nothing, perhaps. He should have known better. It hadn’t even been a line; she was the only person these days whose motives and loyalties he didn’t find himself constantly questioning, and she was  _ competent _ , and so he’d wanted her where he’d sent her, truly, beyond all the rest. Beyond that nagging anxiety, that drive, in the heat of everything, to curl himself around her, or toss himself in front of her. It was a puzzle, why he’d thought he could conceal the second bit from her. Might have been habit.

He wanted to talk to her. It was distracting, just how much.

The room was long and narrow, apart from a section that bulged outward, sloping around an oil bath. The air was thick with the smell of grease and scalded metal, rough ozone tingling his sinuses. Parts, limbs, and joints lay on stacks of shelves and dull durasteel tables. Chassis of various types sat in a row along a section of wall. An LE-series, the only one on base, lowered itself into the bath. Heads clicked and whirred as they turned.

He moved down the length of the room, toward the far corner. His contact was hunched over a bench, soldering a circuit board. A fountain of sparks arced into the air. The visor on the man’s mask flashed yellow and white.

“All secure?” Remb didn’t look up.

Cassian clenched his teeth.  _ I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t _ . He hated small talk, nine times out of ten, and especially when it was a prelude to an exchange of information. He tapped his fingers on the bench’s surface, keeping wide of the iron and its spray. There was tension along his shoulders. He wasn’t a fan of talking around droids. They were worse than people, in some ways, and he’d used it to his own advantage; there had been several times when K2 had miraculously managed to keep his mouth shut, and had been able to pull off a tricky bit of electronic eavesdropping. Cassian felt a pang, deep in the cavity of his chest, pushing outward, knocking at the backs of his ribs. He squeezed his eyes shut, opened them.

_ Focus _ . He glanced about the room again. Noted the supplies. Larger bits, mostly. A few clear cases of chipsets, sticks of RAM, discs and drives. Nothing, that he could see, for more delicate work. He looked over Remb’s bench, considered what was available.

“You’ll need another set of transistors.”

Remb paused. The iron hovered, its flame humming a long, low note. After a moment, he nodded. His grip slackened; his thumb slid upward. The flame died. He lifted the mask and glanced up at Cassian. His face was ruddy and covered with sweat.

“Walk with me,” he said. The mask clanged against the table behind him.

The supply overflow was a few meters from the shop, on the opposite side of the corridor. It was a square alcove, its shelves mismatched, of varying lengths and thicknesses. Remb stepped into it. Cassian would have preferred to follow, to be able to close the door behind them, but there wasn’t enough room. He leaned against the jamb, half his body in, the other half out. He breathed a forced relaxation into his limbs. His eyes roved over the walls, down the passage; up into the corners of the alcove, across the ceiling, down the stacks, to the gaps in between. Over Remb -- just in case, just in case. They’d worked together, off and on, over many, many years, but how many times, now, had that not mattered? He didn’t want to not be able to trust him, and he didn’t want the end that not trusting him would lead to. How bitter that all of his experience could now feel so damning.

His eyes slid back down, out again. He turned his head, slight. Listened. The base felt loud and alive.

It could be enough, just to meet, just to walk off together. The same old worry, the same old tension. Present in the spaces where it was supposed to be absent.

He had to be able to function.

Remb moved parts along the front of a shelf, reached behind them. “They’re all clean, so far.” His voice was pitched low enough that Cassian had to strain to hear. “Still have a few things to check, but they’re looking fine.”

Cassian titled his head toward the overflow. “You wanted to meet for this?” Remb wasn’t stupid. He could have sent all of that in a message, and it would have been safer.

He thought of what Draven might know, and how. If it was all related, then of course he’d be told that High Command was clean. Of course he would. This could be the sign, or one of them, but that was a hell of a supposition to make.

_ Shit. _

“No,” Remb said, with a chuckle. Cassian was at once relieved and anxious. “Found something else. It was kept off official reports.” He picked something up, turned it over in his hand, harrumphed. “S-threads, on a transport, a week ago.”

“We find those all the time. What’s different about these ones?” The question was a formality. He knew. He’d have guessed it, because he’d long ago become more than familiar with the patterns, but this wasn’t guessing. This was he and Jyn, hot and tired and battle-weary, combing over a ship.

“They weren’t found coming in; they were found going out.”

Cassian took a long, slow breath. “And it was a week ago? Exactly?”

“Yeah. Seven standard days. Around midday, if that makes a difference.”

Six days ago, before he’d headed out, he’d given the ship he’d been assigned a thorough inspection. He hadn’t found anything. His official mission, however, had been compromised. There were any number of other ways that could have happened, ways he now had formal backing to investigate -- not that formalities had ever stopped him when he’d had a lead. But this one, this one had precedent. A day was more than enough time. He was Intelligence, and an officer. He should have been informed.

“It might.” There were implications. Ones that worried him. “Who knows about it?” Just to be certain.

“Everyone you’d expect.”

His mouth quirked and he tilted his head back, exhaled. This was it, wasn’t it? The reason it had wound up being so much easier than he’d have ever thought it would be, the reason he’d been primed for a quandary and a connection to push him off-kilter. He wondered, quite seriously, if his mission had been expected to fail.

He wanted to be charitable. It could be that Draven had wanted to gather more information. He was nothing if not a careful man, and Cassian couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t do the same himself, if put in a similar position. But that didn’t explain why he hadn’t been told yesterday.

“Were there any other records like it?”

“Not as far as I know. But something else might turn up.” He paused. “You don’t think it’s the first time.”

Cassian swallowed. There had been no tells from Remb, so far. Then again, maybe there had been, and he’d been trying not to see them. “I don’t know what I think.”

Remb barked a laugh. “Right.” He lifted a small case, rotated it, nodded. “You find anything?”

Tension gathered between Cassian’s shoulder blades and tugged on the base of his neck. The moment had come -- the opportunity to plant a seed, and allow either his doubt or his faith to grow. His mind turned over. He walked back through his leads; through the incidents and outposts and carriers that Jyn had identified for him; through the recruits and transfers he’d already cleared; the lists of names he had yet to parse, the personnel he’d flagged for further review. He couldn’t play off any of them. And he couldn’t,  _ wouldn’t _ use an uninvolved name.

“Nothing concrete.”

Remb slipped the case into his coat pocket. Cassian glanced at his chrono. He had plenty of time to spare, technically, but they couldn’t linger much longer. He had to dangle something.

There was one particular name. One that had already been compromised.

“But I did lose a contact.”

Blood pounded in his ears. He hadn’t reported it, officially (an irony that he was well aware of; how many of them were doing this to each other?) and that meant that there would be questions. He both hoped and dreaded that he’d be asked them.

He didn’t  _ have _ to kill him, did he? He would have, before. He wouldn’t have thought long or hard about it. His mind had zipped straight to it, fewer than twelve hours ago.

Remb had been turning around. He stopped. “Long term?”

“Yes.”

He’d have to warn Jyn. He wondered how she’d take it. She’d been right when she’d pointed out that it was risky, involving someone else. But what could he do? The more places he went digging, the more likely he was to be exposed, and the more likely he was to land them both in trouble. He had no choice but to spread the recon out.

“Who?” His voice dropped another octave. Cassian almost didn’t hear him at all.

He gritted his teeth. The desire to talk to Jyn was blossoming into a pulsing, pounding need, a feeling he’d become very familiar with over the past several weeks. It had a different flavor to it, this time, and he’d be bracing himself for an argument when he did finally see her, but it all flowed from the same place. He wasn’t sure where the balance lay when it came to her. In his line of work, that wasn’t unusual; the liminal was the spy’s playground. He supposed he’d figure it out. But he wished that he was working through it under different circumstances.

He thought of her in his rack, hair down and face lit by half a smile. He’d made her laugh, last night.

He pursed his lips, looked out into the corridor again. He took a breath, then went ahead and said the name. It would be quick, this way. And he was reasonably confident he could throw off any who’d approach him.

Air whistled between Remb’s teeth. “Wouldn’t have expected him.”

“No.”

There was a long silence.

“Let’s get back to the shop.” Voice back up, conversational. “I’m getting cold.”

A muted reaction. Too early to tell what it meant, if it meant anything at all. Could just be he’d been keeping track of the time, himself. Cassian pushed himself away from the jamb. Footsteps, somewhere behind him, off in the distance.

His mind was working. He had latitude, and he knew where next he ought to use it, and there was nothing else to be done or gotten from here. Not today, in any case.

“I’ll pass,” he said. “Thank you, Remb.”

Remb exhaled, hard. “You sure?” He moved past Cassian. “If someone’s watching, they’ll notice.”

Or they wouldn’t. Even odds, on how they’d interpret it, and he was at the point of wanting to provoke a reaction, anyway. “They’d notice whatever we did.” He shrugged. “You know what matters, and what doesn’t.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

Cassian tapped his shoulder. “I’ll be in touch.” He wondered what that would entail. He wondered how much of it would stem from feeling him out, deciding where he stood and what that meant. He could call on him again, only to succumb to a betrayal. He could push him into betraying himself.

“Likewise.”

* * *

As was the case with the vast majority of people on base, Cassian knew the on-duty officer of the deck mainly through records. Seon Aronson had been recruited, if memory served, a little over a year prior. He wasn’t one of Cassian’s, and when he’d come on, Cassian had been on the tail-end of a long-term assignment. They’d spoken only a handful of times. Every single one of them had been after Aronson had landed watch, and none of them had been outside the hangar bay. He could have thought Cassian was anyone. He probably didn’t think of him at all. 

He turned, straightened as Cassian approached. His brow furrowed, just a hair. He’d been chatting with a pilot. They exchanged a nod, and then the pilot left, walking quickly toward the opposite wall. Eyes drifted down, to chest level -- assessing rank. Bounced back up.

_ Not at all it is, then _ . The liminal.

“Captain.”

“Petty Officer.” He removed his gloves, tucked them under his arm. The air stung the backs of his hands. “I need to see the logbook.”

“Right now?”

Cassian blinked at him, glanced across the bay. The garish Y-class freighter was near the shield door -- open, at this time of day -- and its equally garish owner was hanging over its end, shouting something to his Wookiee copilot. Sentients and droids were maintaining ships; clusters were talking, postures halfway between relaxed and not. There was nothing, so far as he could see, in progress. And if anything was, it had already gotten to the point of being beyond Echo proper.

“Yes, right now.” He sniffed and shook his head, shoulders rising and falling. “Unless there’s some other time that would be more convenient for you?” It was incredible that the man would even ask. He felt his mind tilting, teetering back over the edge of the paranoid spiral. It would be easier, with this one. Gentler. That was the benefit and the danger of personal distance.

Seon’s lips thinned. He straightened further, and cocked his head. “This way.”

The office was a tidy room near the hangar’s entrance. It held a desk, a monitor, a locker -- Cassian wondered what the latter’s use could be. The person on watch wouldn’t have any reason to bring their personal effects along. Then again, he was a man of so few that it was likely his experience and understanding wouldn’t link up to anyone else’s.

There was a datapad on the desk. Seon picked it up. His fingers slid over the surface.

“There you are,” he said, proffering it. “The navigation’s not quite right, but…”

“Thank you.” Cassian flashed a tight smile. “I doubt it will be a problem.”

He scrolled through the flight deck records. He went back, at first, further than he needed to, all the way to the beginning of their time on Hoth; he couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a logger installed. Skipped ahead, by a week. Furrowed his brow.

There was a gap.

He was conscious of his breathing. He took in the air. He held it.

He moved ahead, to one week ago, to the day before he’d left base. Names, times, down to the second, and then.

Another gap.

He closed his eyes.

He wanted to talk to Jyn. He wanted, so badly, to talk to Jyn. Even if she was still angry, she’d recognize the significance of this. She’d put aside the thing that they were, for the handful of moments it would take to process it. She might not know what to do. But that wasn’t the point.

Around it. The entries around it were important. He wished he’d brought a disc, and also he didn’t, because anyone worth his or her salt would expect just that, but goodness, it would have made it all easier. He took in the names of those who’d been on deck before and after the gaps. He read them, over and over; blinked and burned them into his mind. He couldn’t approach them all himself. That would call too much attention. He’d have to stagger it, and call on his resources.

He wondered what he’d tell Draven.

He had to tell him something. Under normal circumstances, he’d immediately go to him with this, with this very obvious manipulation of records. He’d explicitly been tasked with uncovering this sort of thing, but… If Draven wasn’t trustworthy… He’d been Imperial, hadn’t he?

There’d been times when Cassian had gone deep, and had been good at it. He’d stretched the cuffs on his Imperial uniform, straightened the collars; reported, with a smile on his face, to men and women who’d casually ordered violent subjugation. He’d been sustained, through all of it, by the knowledge that he was, in truth, on the side of justice. Eventually, he’d betray them, and take them down.

As it turned out, betrayal could take many forms. It should have been obvious.

_ Jyn. _

He had to tell Draven  _ something. _ If he was wrong -- if all of the seemingly incongruous behavior could be explained -- then he ought to report the whole of what he’d done. But there was no way to know.

He looked over the names. Over and over. Squeezed his eyes shut, pictured them in his head.

Handed the datapad back.

“Thank you, Petty Officer.” He put his gloves back on. He moved toward the door.

She’d come, later on, wouldn’t she? Her anger wouldn’t keep her. It might make her more eager, even.

“Keep up the good work.”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this chapter was surprisingly hard to write, despite the fact that it contains the very first scene I envisioned when I started planning this fic. I wrote a version of it over a year ago! And then another. And then another. And this is kind of a combination of all of those versions.
> 
> Anyway. Really hoping to get the ball rolling with this and get updates out faster. Thank you so much to everyone who's reading!

Draven’s office was a small, high-ceilinged square that lay down a blunted corridor, past one end of CIC. It was sparse, functional. The walls were rough and snow-touched. The overhead light was fickle, like so many other lights, in so many other parts of base. He could have gotten something better, if he’d wanted to; some of the other members of High Command certainly had. But that wasn’t who he was.  

Jyn stood at ease, in front of his desk. She felt strange. She didn’t particularly like him, and she knew that he didn’t particularly like her, but he’d seen that she could be useful and get a job done, and so he was fair toward her. That was fine. It wasn’t ideal -- irritating, if she were being honest -- but it was fine. Decent, even, as far as working conditions went. Still, the skin along her temples ran tight. He was holding a datachip. It contained the anomaly she’d found. She hadn’t had a choice; she couldn’t very well  _ not _ report it, not without potentially arousing suspicion. But handing it over… If he was part of the enemy, then she’d just given them a means to cover their tracks. 

Dangerous path to venture down, that. It was Saw-think -- the paranoia that had frightened her more and more as she’d neared her end with him, that had blossomed in full by the time they’d reunited on Jedha; that had found its own twisted voice in the version of her that had wandered, aimless, homeless, and hopeless. But how could she not go down it? It had been a warning, when Cassian had mentioned Draven last night. Different context, sure, but the overall implication was pretty clear.

She wondered how he managed this, how he handled the duality of thought. She wondered what he was doing right now. She was mad at him; she wanted to see him. She needed to talk to him about this, about what was happening, about what she’d found, about what she’d had to do with it. She needed to confront him. He shouldn’t have shielded her like that. He shouldn’t have acted like her CO. How could he not act like her CO when, at the time, he had technically been her CO? What the hell had she expected him to do? Treat her differently just because they were together? What did that even mean, really? Force, she was all screwed up.

A thought occurred to her. It made her feel queasy. She pushed it aside.

“What’s the duration?” 

“0.19 seconds,” Jyn said. Then, almost as an afterthought: “sir.”

He sighed, planted an elbow on the desk, and leaned into his hand. Pressed his forefinger to the side of his nose, curled the rest of his fist around his chin. The light dimmed, for a long spell, and when it came back up, it glinted off the chip. “I doubt we’ll get much from it,” he said, “but I’ll have A9G-57 analyze it.” 

Well, that was something. Maybe.

Draven rubbed the chip with his thumb. “During the breach...” He tapped his nose, once, twice. “Toward the end of the outage?”

“Yes. Probably wouldn’t have picked it up, otherwise.”

“Mm.” He fell silent for a moment. Then, he nodded, and let his hand drop, and put the chip down. “Regardless what we’re able to make of the transmission itself, it’s good to have caught it. Well done.” It almost sounded like he meant it. Not that she cared.

He bent forward, over his desk and his datapad and a small stack of flimsi. She watched him, and waited. There was a way, if they really needed to, to get the message back. She couldn’t be the one to get it; that’d raise an army of red flags. And it might not even matter, anyway. To a certain extent, it was enough to know simply that it existed. But Cassian needed every scrap of information she could get for him (she’d keep doing it, she needed to, she had to be useful, she could handle herself and he shouldn’t have put himself in harm’s way), and beyond that, the state of the message after it was passed to the droid would be telling. She hoped she’d be able to tell that it had been altered.

She caught herself, swallowed. Here she was, already assuming it  _ would _ be altered. Dangerous mindset, easy to slip into. 

Draven was still hunched over when he spoke again. He was writing. He did not look at her. “It’s my understanding that you were at the South Passage this morning.”

The shift was jarring. She drew in a sharp breath. Heat spread through her chest and crept up her neck. A prickle of anxiety, drifting in the center of a surge of anger.  _ Are you kidding me. _ It was a neutral statement, dropped all on its own. No preamble, no further explanation, nothing, and yet she knew. She knew exactly what he meant. And for all that she’d expected it -- for all that the thought of it had brought her up short at the edge of Cassian’s quarters -- it still struck hard enough that she struggled to keep her features neutral. It was one thing for a peer like Voya to give them looks, and another altogether for General kriffing Draven to point it out.

She gritted her teeth. “I was.”

“You spend a lot of time in that part of base.”

Her anger swelled, straightening her already rigid back, and her thoughts turned over. People talked, of course, and it was part of his job to know everything he reasonably could about what went on on base, so it didn’t necessarily mean that she was being watched. But, oh, it sure sounded a hell of a lot like she was being watched. Combine that with the  _ assignment _ he’d given Cassian, and… What else did he know? What else had his people seen her doing? Several caustic retorts ran through her head. She clenched her jaw and didn’t say them.

Took a lot of effort. 

At length, he stopped writing. He looked back up at her and interlaced his fingers, elbows at angles, forearms pressed against the desk. “It’s none of my business who you see when you’re off-duty, Erso.”

_ No shit. _

“But I’d advise you to exercise caution.”

In an instant, the heat dissipated. It sped off down her spine. She felt her expression change, despite her best efforts; felt her forehead crease. Felt a  _ click _ in the back of her head. Her eyes slid to the datachip, then snapped back to him. She watched his gaze shift upwards, to one corner, and then to the other. They made eye contact. He held it. The air thickened. The light spat out an electric buzz. 

Slowly, she nodded. 

He looked at her for a moment longer before unclasping his hands and dipping his head, returning his attention to his desk. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention.” Writing, again. Detached. “You’re dismissed.” 

For a handful of seconds, she hesitated. That wasn’t at all what she’d expected. Her legs were heavy. But she moved them, forcing herself to turn to the door. 

She didn’t bother to salute. He wouldn’t see it, anyway.

_...the hell? _

The door swished shut behind her. She was dazed. She had trouble making sense of what had just happened, trouble figuring out how to feel. She already had enough crap to work through. She shook her head, lifted her wrist. Twenty minutes until her patrol shift started. Enough time to log out of her Comms station and beat feet to the hangar. She walked, fast. A rebel in the passage scoffed and stepped out of her way. 

Her breaths came slow and deliberate. They might be able to rule him out. That was good, wasn’t it? It would be good for Cassian; it would help him, in more ways than one. But Draven had given her another warning on top of the one she’d already gotten, and she really didn’t like the thrust of it.

If he was clean, then he was on Cassian’s side, not hers. She didn’t matter, except as a possible obstacle. It was reassuring and familiar (when had she ever mattered? Being her father’s daughter didn’t count, because that wasn’t about  _ her _ ). It was also a stone in her gut. 

She squinted into the dark of Communications. The others there weren’t looking at her. Discretion, and all that. Maybe someone would ask her later, in the passages or in the mess, if they were that sort, and if they got up the nerve. A couple of them were okay with her, had been among those who’d given her a smile and a clap on the back in the days after Scarif. Sometimes, they even said hello. She’d have to think of something to tell them.

Did Draven suspect someone in particular? Was it general? Knots, tight and pulling tighter. He wasn’t the only one watching. Over the years, her restlessness had gotten her into a jam or two, to put it mildly. But she wasn’t an idiot. She wouldn’t have been able to survive for so long if she was. She always checked and double-checked and minimized, when possible. But apparently, in this case, it wasn’t enough. 

_ If I can’t do it… _

That queasy feeling again. She had to talk to Cassian. She was terrified of talking to Cassian, because it was seeming more and more like she’d have to back off. The worst of it was that it wouldn’t even have to be a practical consideration. He’d shown that earlier. He could decide it was too risky because he didn’t want  _ her _ to be at risk, and he could ask her to lay low almost as a favor, and that wouldn’t be the same, but it would have the same effect. Sure, they’d still see each other, but it would be the start. She knew how these things went. 

In the end, either way, she’d wind up alone again.

The passages were cramped from the shift change, and she drew in on herself and flattened her profile, navigating the bodies with long-practiced ease. She buzzed, like she’d chugged a gallon of caf, with the tense kind of energy that set most people to pacing and drove her to get punched or shot at or locked up. It was the strange, delicate irony of her life, that she was both smart enough to survive and also, seemingly, determined to find a way to die. And that was supposed to be the point of all of this. Finding something between the two extremes. Living for something else, the way she’d once done, if she drifted back far enough, before Tamsye Prime, and parsed through all the crap. Well, part of that something was  _ Cassian _ . Part of it was repaying his steadfastness, being there when he needed her. Or just...being. 

_ Kriff _ .

She needed to get her brain to slow down. She needed physical movement. She forced herself to think of the patrol route, of the endless plains and mountains of ice, of the cold and the quiet. She wasn’t a particular fan of any of it, but she’d be active, once she was out there, and she’d have a focus, and she could breathe fresh air and find any number of tactile things to occupy her mind and senses. It’d get her straightened out. Maybe. Hopefully.

At least she wouldn’t be bent over a console.

She reached the hangar with three minutes to spare. The quartermaster’s was nearly as crowded as the corridors had been, and she found herself tapping the ball of her foot as she waited to collect a set of outer gear. Personnel brushed past her, some briefly catching her eye, then looking away. Hard to say the reason for it, but she knew that, at the moment, she probably didn’t look terribly friendly.

It was after she’d collected a subzero jacket, a mask, and a pair of goggles that her assigned partner approached her. His stance was wide, and his shoulders were rolled forward, and he was already buckled into his coat (his  _ own _ coat, not a shared one from general supply), the one that, save for the color, reminded her of Cassian’s. Good thing, she thought, that she wouldn’t have to look at it for long.

In greeting, she flicked her jaw toward him. “Solo.”

“Erso.” He flashed her a quick, lopsided, not-quite-smile. 

“Surprised you’re not patrolling with Skywalker.” She’d frowned when she’d seen his name beside hers. She didn’t have a problem with him (he knew what he was doing well enough, if you could get past the cockiness and the snark -- materially little different from the other smugglers she’d known in her lifetime), but she didn’t expect to work with him. They ran in different circles and lived on different shifts.

“He’s running exercises with Rogue Squadron.”

Jyn’s chest tightened, and so did her fists. Her next breath was shallow and hard. Two words, halting, uttered by a man she would have liked to get to know, echoed in her skull.

She swallowed. Turned her head, shrugged on the coat. “I see.” Moved her fingers over the fastens, cinched the belts, the uppermost one digging into her ribs. It was a poor fit, like her issued thermal, but it wasn’t as if there were many to spare, and it was the closest available to her size. She wasn’t going to complain. After all, she at least had  _ access _ to a coat. In fact, she had access to two different ones, and one of them she even got to keep with her own stuff. Quite the luxury.

She started walking, gloves cradled in her arm, mask and goggles hooked over her fingers. Han fell into step beside her. A man passed them going in the opposite direction, clutching a datapad, head bowed, and Solo twisted sideways, avoiding contact with both the stranger and Jyn.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you, anyway,” he said. “This makes it less of a hassle.”

She glanced at him. They had interacted very little, in their time on Echo -- enough to each get something of the measure of the other, and not much more. She’d seen him in passing, and heard talk about him (and, boy, did people talk), but that, of course, was different. She couldn’t think of any reason for him to want to talk to her, and she didn’t have any reason to seek him out, either. And she certainly couldn’t think of any reason why he’d do what she was pretty sure he’d just implied he’d done. 

“Don’t see how. Unless you plan on hugging my ass and making this take twice as long.” In truth, she wouldn’t mind being out there longer than necessary, but that was neither here nor there.

He huffed. “Very funny.”

“Sure.”

They had emerged into the hangar proper, and were within a few meters of the shield door, which was wide open. At the threshold, a handful of fresh powder caught on a gust, spiraled upward, nearly struck the ceiling before collapsing and fluttering back down. Jyn heard a low bray. She turned to see a handler leading over a pair of tauntauns.  

“Look, let’s cut the crap and get on with it. You have a reputation…”

Heat, again. Rising up from the pit of her stomach. “So do you.”

He adjusted the tack on his tauntaun. “...so I went and read your file.”

_ The hell is this?  _ She regarded the bright white expanse of Hoth with longing. Her skin was crawling, and every single person she came across today seemed to exist solely to needle or confuse her, or both, and her head was spinning, and she really, really needed to get outside and be alone.

“Oh?” She thrust her foot into a stirrup, grasped the pommel, hoisted herself up. The animal’s scent assaulted her nostrils. 

“You’ve, uh, heard of the Pathfinders?”

Her head snapped to him. She’d hooked the strap of the goggles around the back of her head, and was starting to pull them down. They hovered, now, in hands that had gone still. Yes, she’d heard of them. She even knew a few of their names, from the winnowing she’d done for Cassian.

Solo was astride his own saddle and was tugging the edge of his hood into place. The fur spilled over his forehead. “You have a background in guerilla warfare, you have explosives and hand-to-hand combat training, you’re okay with a blaster, and you managed to sneak into an Imperial base. More than one, if you can believe Imp records.” He smiled in that lopsided way, again, but it stuck around longer this time. “You’d make a good fit.” 

There was a second -- although it felt like much, much longer -- when she had no idea what to say, how to react. This was the second conversation she’d had in less than an hour that had veered off in an unexpected direction, and it felt a bit like getting whiplash. The intent behind his words resolved itself, and she decided that yes, yes, it was as she’d suspected: he’d gotten himself paired with her on purpose.

So, it appeared, he could try and recruit her.

Her hands started moving again. She settled the goggles over her eyes. “I already have a division.”

“C’mon, kid.”

_ Kid? _

“Don’t tell me you like being in intel.”

The knots in her stomach tautened. She felt her anxiety like a plucked string, its vibrations flowing up and down and outward.

“What makes you think I don’t?” She didn’t, of course, most of the time. But that wasn’t why she was there. 

“Call it a hunch.”

They were moving toward the door. The tauntaun’s gait was high and rough, even at a walk. In a certain sense, she was accustomed to it, but her thighs would ache later on, as they always did. She checked the frequency on her commlink, synced it with Solo’s, and reached up to her mask. His was already secured across the lower half of his face.

“So,” he said, voice muffled, “what do you say?”

Her heart thumped hard enough for her to hear it. He was right that it would be a good fit for her. It aligned with everything she’d been taught, with all of the things she’d done growing up and couldn’t stop doing once she’d been cut loose. It would be active. It would be an outlet. 

She thought of Saw. She thought of a night, late, when she was 14, going to him with something, something she could no longer remember, but that she was pretty sure was some stupid teenage bantha fodder. He had meant to be alone. He was leaning forward. His hands were covering his face, and when he’d pulled them back, his eyes were wet, and so were his fingers.

She thought of Draven. She thought of silent footsteps, mirroring her own. 

She thought of Cassian. 

What if she  _ had _ to back off? What if she couldn’t safely help him anymore?

What if he was okay with that? 

_ Putting himself in harm’s way like a... _

“I’ll think about it,” she said, securing her gloves. She needed to talk to Cassian.  

Han nodded. “Well, don’t think too long. I don’t like being yanked around.”

She also needed this patrol. Kriff, her head was a mess, and she had to get it in order before she went and did something really stupid. 

“Got a preference?”

They’d be splitting as soon as they were out the door, touching base from time to time, keeping comms open. This, she didn’t give a second thought to. Even with everything; even with her nerves fraying and her brain working overtime, with her lingering anger and her restlessness and her boredom and confusion and fear and astonishment and all the rest, the answer was obvious. The transmission had come during the breach. And she wasn’t out of the game just yet.

She couldn’t, wouldn’t stop trying. 

“South,” she replied.


	5. Chapter 5

He still hadn’t spoken to Draven.

He’d gone about his day, scraps of intel tap dancing on his chest, and he hadn’t messaged him. Hadn’t gone to him. It wasn’t unprecedented; he’d acted outside of the chain of command fewer than two months ago. And there’d been times before that, too, when he’d chosen to keep mum, and had done what he’d needed to do on his own, for any number of reasons. But this was different. He knew it. 

Now, it was early evening, and he was moving through the East Passage, toward its set of barracks, knowing that he could have, should have, been going to the general’s office, instead. He could have saved this for later, and still had time to spare before meeting Jyn in his quarters (assuming she was going to show). Yet that wasn’t what he was doing.

Remb hadn’t really implicated Draven. It was all subtext and supposition, drawn from withheld information and little more, and yet, the notion that it could point to  _ something _ was turning and wouldn’t leave him alone. His stomach rocked and rolled from it. It was silly, on some level. He’d gone head-to-head with Imp commanders, and had lived to want to forget it. If he’d been asked, he would have pegged that as the harder thing to do. Well, what had he ever really known?

He rapped on a door. A pair of Sullustans walked past, speaking in their native tongue. He wasn’t practiced in it. They used several words he didn’t recognize, but that he could guess from context wouldn’t go over well in polite company. Hard day for them. Something about a malfunctioning astromech. 

He could spin this, at least. He was gathering more information. It would excuse the delay. And it would give him extra play, buy him time to consider how to meter his words.

Of course, there was another reason, too.  

At length, a woman of his height answered the door. Despite her youth, her hair was the color of Hoth. Her eyebrows climbed when she saw him.

“Captain Andor.” She was surprised.

“Ensign Konn.” He cocked his head, peering around and behind her. Two sets of racks, top and bottom, flush with walls that curved over and around them. A desk. A closet. A storage chest. It was small, cramped, and vacant, save for her. He’d expected that; he’d checked her bunkmates’ schedules. Still had to confirm. “May I come in?”

“Um.” She frowned, hesitated. He hated the way that made his thoughts start cycling. He was here, following up, but he didn’t want to suspect her. It would mean… “Sure.” She took a step back and to the left. He moved past her, eyes still sweeping, catching on the corners, on the undersides of the top racks, and then on the bottom ones. On the light fixture. He could be more thorough, but that would be a tell. There was always a trade-off: look for bugs, and give yourself away; decline to look, and risk them being there.

He heard the door close behind him, turned toward her. She was still frowning. 

“It’s been a while.”

“It has,” he agreed. There was a picture on a shelf. He settled his back against the bunks opposite from it and crossed his arms. Funny thing. He’d never let himself feel guilty about the way he handled his acquaintances and his recruits. They were all there to do a job, and it was a job that mattered more than anything, including personal connections. He wasn’t callous or cruel. He wouldn’t leave someone behind if he could help it, and he'd be helpful and supportive when a comrade needed him to be. But he had always maintained a professional distance, and he’d rarely gone out of his way to spend time with anyone. If he’d ever felt lonely, well, he’d had the one real friend.

_ Don’t think about it. _

He sure felt guilty now. He’d felt guilty from the moment he’d recognized her name, and he’d felt it again when he’d decided that she’d be the first one he spoke to. It was partially because of Jyn (how many changes, how fast, Force, he wanted to see her). It was also because… It would be another blow, another punch to the gut, if she turned out to be an actual suspect. 

Marin Konn had been one of his first recruits. Years ago, back when it had still been new for him. He’d struggled with it, in those days. The contradiction of it all had thrown him. He was a spy. Spies sold a fiction. Recruiters sold a truth. He’d spent so much time perfecting his ability to lie -- dropping into personas; professing beliefs and attitudes he detested; acting contrary to his ideals and values; befriending and obeying those he hated; betraying and killing those who’d come to trust him. Closing off. Shutting down. Compartmentalizing. What would he do, now that he had to put his actual self into the job? Knotty prospect. Probably should have been a warning sign, that he’d come to view deception as easier, and preferable, to honesty. 

Of course, it had gone well in the end. He’d done fine; better than, really. There was a sense of relief in it. He’d run into new recruits on base, and there’d been that familiar jolt --  _ mark, out of context, be mindful, what’s your story, recite _ \-- and then...nothing. Nothing, because there was no story to keep up. They knew who he was, or at least where he belonged. He’d found that he liked that. And he relished the fact that he didn’t have to do all of the terrible things that his other tasks required of him. 

He’d gladly done it again. And again. He’d excelled, and gone out alone. Cultivated an altogether different sort of network. Landed himself control of a system. Control of a sector. It had become the part of his job that he liked best. It was little wonder that it was the part that had been taken from him, and the part that Draven had dangled over his head.

_ What will I say to him? What  _ can  _ I say? _

He’d tagged Marin in those early, uncertain days. He’d been very nervous, and he’d been very open, because he hadn’t figured out where to draw the line. She’d really thought he was her friend, and maybe he kind of was, for a time.

He felt sick over this.

She sat down on the bunk he’d guessed was hers. She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her thighs. “So. What’s up?”

Straight to the point. He appreciated that. “I need to ask you about an assignment you were on, three weeks ago,” he said. “The transport mission.”

She sighed, shook her head, smiled in a resigned sort of way. “Yeah. Okay.” 

There it was. She didn’t say it, but she didn’t have to: he hadn’t spoken to her in how long, and now he’d come around, and it was for this. There were a lot of people who would have had the same reaction, although their numbers were thinning. He’d gotten better at not giving the impression of friendship.

He forced himself to focus. “Your crewmates -- how well do you know each of them? Had you worked with them before?”

“Uh…” She crinkled her brow. She looked like she hadn’t expected him to go in the direction he had. “Yeah, with both of them. Dedeker more, though.”

“What’s ‘more?’”

She paused to think. “He and I work together...I don’t know, six or seven times a year? Harish and I almost never do.”

All right, then. Now he knew she’d gone with two others, and he knew their names. Her name was recorded right before one of the gaps in the log, and he doubted she would have gone alone, and he’d been loathe to access her mission records after visiting the flight deck. Checking the shifts of her bunkmates had been risky enough. So, he’d gotten her to name them for him. His chest rose and fell. He recognized both names, although he couldn’t put a face to either. That didn’t matter so much. What did matter was that neither of them was new to the Alliance, and both of them had spent some time at Yavin, before and after the Battle of Scarif.  

A corner of his memory itched.

“What’s your impression of them?”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “Do you like them? Dislike them? Are they good at their jobs?”

“I wouldn’t say I’m friends with them, but I get along with them okay. Dedeker’s a little aloof, I guess, but a lot of people are.” The last was said with added emphasis. He ignored the dig, and she narrowed her eyes, and clasped her hands together. “Captain, what’s this all about? Did we do something wrong?”

He tilted his head back.  _ Not you _ , he wanted to say,  _ just them. _ “Not necessarily.”

There was a silence, as if she expected him to say more. He didn’t. Her posture changed. She nodded. “Okay.”

He nodded back. “How did the mission go?”

“It was successful.”

“Did anything unusual happen? Did you run into any problems?”

She blinked. It looked, to him, as if there was something she’d wanted to say, but then decided not to. There was a knot in him, and it tightened. He told himself that he couldn’t be sure it meant anything, that it probably didn’t. She was a person being questioned, acting like a person being questioned. “We had some engine trouble when we were leaving Refnar. Other than that, everything went fine.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Routine stuff, you know, should’ve been caught during maintenance. Dedeker fixed it, no problem.” She huffed. “I put a complaint in when we got back.”

Well, that was something. “Nothing else?”

“Uh, no.” 

He straightened. The heater switched on and filled the room with its white-noise hum. It was less information than he’d wanted, but it was also enough. He could ask more, push more, and there was value in that approach. At the same time, it could reveal his hand, and he had to play it close. 

“Thank you, Marin,” he said, after a beat. He took a step away from the racks, arms still folded. She was wearing that resigned smile again. 

“You’re welcome.”

He moved toward the door. Shea Harish and Aramis Dedeker. He’d add the names to the list he already planned to give to Jyn. He’d check that a complaint had been made. He’d send a message to the base on Refnar, verifying the engine repair, and asking whether anything else had happened. Marin wasn’t stupid; she would have swept her ship. And she would have told him if she’d found trackers, or anything else. She would have. He’d recruited her. She wouldn’t lie to him. That wasn’t how it worked. 

His thoughts veered toward Remb. Hells, he didn’t want to kill these people. There were so many he hadn’t wanted to kill, and he wanted it all to stop.

“Hey, Captain?”

He turned back.   


“You ever wanna stop by, you know, just because. You can.” 

His ears rang. He forced himself to smile, and then left without responding.

* * *

It was 20:30. Jyn wasn’t there. 

He tried not to pay attention. He tried not to be disappointed yet, and he told himself that he wouldn’t be, because he’d already thought she might blow him off. He tried not to acknowledge how full he was, how the tension in him was tugging at his temples and hairline. 

20:32, and he tried to ignore the fact that he felt queasy. He called up the mental exercises he used in the field. He berated himself. He wondered, about many things. He again thought of Draven, about when he’d go to him, and about how he’d phrase his report.

20:35, and she was at his door.

They stood there. His heart fluttered. There was no attempt to put on an act for passers-by, on either of their parts. That was a first. 

“Hey.”

“Hey.” The word felt crisp and dry.

She stepped into the room. Kept her weapons on her person. It wasn’t threatening, that; it was a sign of withdrawal. She looked up at him, and then down, and then off to the side. He watched her shoulders edge up as she took a breath, watched her chin tilt.

Had he felt awkward last night? He couldn’t be sure, because whatever it was he’d felt then, it wasn’t anywhere near as uncomfortable as this. He had no idea what he was supposed to do or say. Of course she was still mad. Of course. It was Jyn, and he’d expected her to be. He had spent all day thinking about this moment, thinking he’d know what it would be like, waiting and wanting (and wanting to share with her, unload, shed it all and sink in), and now he was standing and staring. Heart thumping. Steady, not too fast, not unlike the way it did when he was slipping into an assumed identity.

She shifted some; her eyes glanced off of him, bounced around. He realized he was squaring and steeling himself as if he was working. He wasn’t shutting down, far from it, but he’d look as if he was.

She wasn’t saying anything. He should say something.

“I have a lead.” Really, Andor? That’s how you start it? “I’ve got some names.” There was so much more to it than that, but nothing more would come.

Her lips parted, then closed. “Good.” Another shift. “I can probably check them tomorrow, if that’s what you want. I’ll have terminal access.” 

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Right.” A pause. Long. “I’ve got some things of my own,” she said.  

He nodded dumbly. Silence. Breaths. Eye contact. Her jaw was tight, and so was his. The air was heavy, around him and in him, in his chest and in his throat, and everything was...clogged. There was a whole torrent of impressions and longings and explanations and  _ words _ and all of it was lodged in a thick, cotton-mouthed something or other. He felt a knot of anger, or frustration. She wasn’t  _ talking _ to him, and he was not talking right back. It was ridiculous, foolish. Operationally, he wouldn’t stand for it; there were things to be said and done, and yet here he was, and here was she. The overhead light was behind her head. It filtered through her hair, limned her face. Her eyes were so green.

He took a step toward her. She straightened again. “Jyn,” he said. He was surprised by how breathy his voice sounded. “Look…” It was stuck. He forced it. “Earlier, at the breach…”

She cut him off. “We’re doing this, then?”

Of course they were. Why wouldn’t they, when it seemed like it was consuming everything? The air needed to be let back in the room. “Shouldn’t we?”

She hooked her thumbs into her coat pockets, and moved in a way that wasn’t quite a shrug. Her eyes once again slid off of his. “There are other things.” 

He blinked. He was taken aback. This wasn’t like her. She was reserved, in many ways, but so far, he hadn’t known her to shy away from confrontation. She could be brutal in her embrace of it. It struck him that that might be part of the problem.  _ You try to protect me in your own way, don’t you, Jyn? _

“There are,” he said. “We’ll address them.” He leaned to the side, tried to capture her gaze. It took a moment, but she got the point, peered at him, head turned, lips drawn, tension in her, tension he hadn’t wanted to see again. This was stupid. It shouldn’t be happening. It had to be dealt with. “We need to do this first.”

Eyes locked back onto his. Teeth grinding. More silence, and his heart, thumping, in a way that he recognized, and in a way that wasn’t like anything he’d ever let himself feel.

“I can handle myself,” she said, at last. 

“What? I know that.”

“You put yourself in harm’s way, and you took me out of it.”

The thing that might be anger flared. “You think I can’t handle  _ myself _ , then?”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I was fine, and I needed someone to lead the second team. Someone I trusted.” But he knew exactly what she meant. And he knew that she was right, at least partially, because he’d wanted her on the less risky course. He admired the way she fought, and recognized and respected her expertise, but… If she was hurt, because of the way he’d read a situation, because of orders that he’d given…

Well. There wasn’t really any way out of that, was there, given who and what they were and what was going on. Ridiculous, all of it. He was going to give her a set of names, and she was going to look into them. She was going to provide him with her own bits of intel. She was going to continue helping him and he was going to continue tying himself in knots over the question of her safety, because that was the way that things were.

Her bottom lip trembled. She was still holding herself back. “It could have been someone else.”

“No, Jyn, I’m not sure that it could have been.” He closed his eyes. Even Eri, the sapper he’d assigned to her, whom he’d known for nearly a decade, couldn’t be trusted as well as she could. He probably should have found that odd. He didn’t. “What would you have had me do?”

“Treat me like…” She paused, struggled, visibly. “...like we’re a team. Like I’m working  _ with _ you, not under you.”

He huffed. “We  _ are _ a team. I came up with a plan based on something that  _ you _ noticed and suggested. But I had taken command of the response, and…”

“You sent me away!” The words did not echo. They struck the walls, and dropped, heavy, to the floor. She had drawn herself up, as she said them, and moved closer, her tone rising, her fists balling, and suddenly, it clicked. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened. He realized it was only just now clicking for her, as well. 

He hadn’t thought… Compartmentalization. What an excuse.

“Oh, Jyn.” His shoulders sagged. How many people in her life had left her, or had ordered her to leave them? Some of it was reflected in her record, and they’d talked about it a little; she’d asked him about Fest, so it had only been fair. But he knew he hadn’t gotten the whole of it. What he did know was that it had happened, and that it had  _ kept _ happening. And, stupidly, he’d gone and made it look like he was going to do it to her, too. 

He pressed his thumb to his temple, dragged his fore and middle fingers across his forehead. How could he  _ not _ make it look that way? They wouldn’t always be able to stay together in a fight. How was he supposed to handle that, especially since he  _ did _ outrank her, and it would draw the exact wrong sort of attention if he acted like he didn’t?

He found himself thinking dour thoughts, traitorous thoughts. It was too hard. It was all just too hard, and he was no good at it, and the only thing that really mattered was the mission, regardless how…

No. No, that was a mistake, that was a long, slow, rotting pain that hurt some allies and left others dead.  _ He would do what she required. _ He had already decided. He had already cast aside his old mode of living and given a piece of himself to her, and he would not turn away from that. He couldn’t. He needed her. She was safe. She made him want to be better.

His fingers twitched. He longed to reach for her, but he wasn’t sure she’d want that. 

“I know you were fine,” she said.

He didn’t think she did, if the movement of her jaw and the thickening of her voice were anything to go by.

“But…” She pressed her lips together. “That doesn’t make it feel any better, having to…” She trailed off.

For a handful of seconds, he just looked at her.  _ I didn’t mean to make you feel that way. I never want to make you feel that way. _ “I...don’t really know how to do this.”

She tilted her head, moved as if she were squaring up, and yet edged closer to him. There was an almost-smile, like the one she’d given him in the data vault. “I know,” she said. “It’s hard.”

Should he push it? It might not be the time. But it was something that needed to be taken care of. If they were going to avoid drawing too much attention to themselves, if they were going to  _ survive _ , then they needed to work out some sort of balance. There had to be a way for them to act appropriately in the field without him summoning bad memories. 

“There are going to be times when I have to give you orders, if only to give the right impression.”

She eased back a little, and her posture stiffened, but her eyes didn’t leave his. He held her gaze and leaned toward her, until his face was close enough for her breath to wash over it. He wanted this point to stick. He wanted her to feel the truth of it. He saw a change in her before he’d even spoken, a ripple coasting down, through head and neck and shoulders. “But I will listen to you, and I will not abandon you.”

_ Can you really make that promise, Andor? _

She blinked, and creased her brow. Swallowed.

“I mean it,” he said.

Her breaths quickened. There was a pallor to her that hadn’t been there before. He wondered if he’d screwed up. But then, slowly, she nodded.

“All right.” So quiet.

He did reach for her, then, hands wrapping around her upper arms. Her head dipped, and her fingertips landed lightly on his hips. He itched to embrace her, but something stopped him. The same thing, he wagered, that was stopping her. She tucked her head under his chin, and her nose struck the hollow of his throat. He focused on that, on the flush of contact, on the heat of her, spreading outward and sparking along the surface of his skin. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. One of his hands moved to her neck, squeezed, then drifted further up, to the back of her head, above her bun. Her grip on his hips was firmer, now, but there was still a pocket of space between them. 

He wondered if he ought to put less of this on her. There’d be less confusion, that way. But, of course, that wouldn’t help in situations like the one they’d been in this morning, and it wouldn’t make him worry any less about her. Besides, he  _ wanted _ to work with her. They functioned well as partners. He didn’t want to lose that, and it.was obvious that she didn’t, either. He smoothed her hair, rested his head on top of hers. This was so much more complicated than he’d thought it would be. He wasn’t a fan of that. But he wanted her, and he wanted this fragile thing that existed between them. Needed it.

Her breaths evened out. The fabric of his trousers bunched in her hands, which then crept to his waist. She looked up at him. Less guarded, now, her chest rising and falling, measured. She was very warm. “Are you…” Hesitant, unfinished. He got the meaning well enough, though. It surprised him, because he hadn’t expected her to shift focus so quickly. He supposed it meant they’d done an okay job of resolving things.

And they  _ did _ have more to talk about. Once they’d started putting it off, he’d have kept on, as long as she needed. He hoped she realized that.

He considered how to answer. Doubt and paranoia, second-guessing, self-directed turmoil -- it was all swirling just beneath the surface. He’d ached to be able to share it with her, and now that he had the opportunity, he had no idea where to start. He let out a chuckle. “I feel like I’m losing my damn mind.”

The muscles of her face moved, in a certain way. He was getting to know her expressions, subtle as they could be, and he read concern in this one. Incredible. She’d been so mad at him! But, well, that was her, wasn’t it? Arguing with you one moment, shielding you with her body the next. She inclined her head toward the bunk. “Sit down,” she said. 

He nodded, and let her lead him, her fingers sliding along the curve of his waistband and landing at the small of his back. She sat beside him. Her hands curled around the edge of the mattress; her knee knocked into his and stayed there. He soaked up the lingering contact.

And then, he told her everything. He started with the things that were operationally relevant -- the S-threads, the gaps, the names, the trajectory of his investigation -- and then he spoke on the rest, on all the bits cluttering up the spaces in between. Remb and Marin and Draven, his churning thoughts, confusion, lapsed faith, shifting loyalty, guilt. There was no particular order to any of it, and it felt...strange. It was so new. He didn’t do this. He didn’t open himself up.  _ Compartmentalization. _ She made him want to, had already gotten him to, but he felt exposed. He felt selfish.

She was silent, for a long while. She watched him, listened, waited. Whether it was because she couldn’t think of anything to say, or because she thought it was best, he couldn’t tell, and he found that it didn’t matter. There was a lot that she could have done that she  _ wasn’t _ doing. It turned out that that was more the point.

“It’s...a lot,” she said, some time after he’d finished speaking.

“Yes.”

She sighed. Grabbed his opposite shoulder, pulled him to her. Turned, pressed her forehead to his. Their noses brushed together. Silence, again, but the acceptance in it, and in all that she was doing, was very clear. It was astounding.

“Thank you,” he whispered.

“For what?”

He shrugged. She harrumphed. He pulled back, and brushed her bangs behind her ear. If he was being honest, he wanted to kiss her, but there was more, and they had to go over it. “You said you had something?” He hoped she understood.

She frowned. “You sure?”

The mission might not be the only thing that mattered, but it mattered, nonetheless. “Has to be done.” 

She smirked. “You probably should’ve let me tell you, then.” She was teasing him. That was as sure a sign as any that they were okay.

“Jyn…”

She flashed a smile that was gone as quickly as he’d noticed it, then paused, and shifted her eyes to a spot on the wall beside his head. “We intercepted a transmission. I had to turn it over to Draven, but I know where it’s wound up.” She furrowed her brow. “I don’t think…” A heavy breath. “I know you’re worried about him, but I don’t think you have to be.” 

He blinked. “What?”

“He’s on your side.”

He wasn’t sure how to take that. He should have been relieved, but there was something else there, something implied in her tone. He couldn’t put his finger on what it was.  _ Is she just trying to reassure me? _ Well-intentioned insincerity? No, no, that wasn’t her style. Troubled feelings, and no place for them to go. He’d have to think on it and ask her again later. “Anything else?”

Her gaze dropped to the floor, then moved back up to his face. “When I was on patrol, I checked on the South Passage.” Her throat worked. “Have you talked to Aldes at all since this morning?”

Nervous energy seeped into his gut. “No, but I read her report.” There hadn't been anything unusual in it. “Why?”

She pursed her lips. Her brow furrowed. The professional in him sat up, at attention. “I don’t think the generator malfunction was an accident.”

* * *

He sat on the end of his rack. Jyn’s heels were touching his hip, through the covers. His back hurt. He was cold. It reminded him of nights long ago, nights he tried not to think about, but that this rotten place couldn’t help but call to mind. He made no move to cover up. 

He couldn’t quiet his thoughts. He’d messaged Voya. They were going to meet tomorrow. He was a patient person; he’d had to be. He should have been able to lean into that. But there was a tickle in the back of his head, and it was nagging at him. 

He was remembering something. He’d been remembering it since he’d spoken with Marin, and he couldn’t figure out what it was. He rubbed the sides of his head. The stress and turmoil were getting to him, affecting his mental processing. It had been a long time since that had happened, but then, he’d never dealt with something like this.

The blankets rustled. Jyn stirred beside him, and he looked back over his shoulder. 

“What are you doing?” she asked, voice husky from sleep. In the low light, he couldn’t make out her expression.

Thinking. “Nothing.”

She drew up her legs, tenting the blankets, and eased herself down the length of the mattress, coming up beside him. “You need to sleep.”

He didn’t say anything. This close, he could see her eyes, and strands of hair, broken free from her bun. The side of her hand grazed his. They hadn’t had sex; they’d just wound themselves around each other, grasping, holding tight. He felt better now than he had before, but he was still off-kilter, and he was amazed that she’d stayed, after everything had been said and done.

Of course, he was amazed every night she stayed.  

She must have taken his silence as acquiescence, because she grabbed his upper arm, just above the elbow, and tugged him backwards. “C’mon. Don’t make me drag you.”

He let out a breath. Well, he could lie awake as easily as he could sit awake, and he could hold her, maybe, for a time.

What was it? He could feel it, just out of reach, and there was a sense that if he could grasp it, then something would fall into place.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught the flash of the indicator light on his datapad. It pulsed against the corner of his desk and a small patch of wall, white on white. He frowned. Levered himself up, and moved over Jyn, who heaved a sigh.

“It’ll be there in the morning. If it was urgent, they’d have comm’d.”

“I know that.” And he knew what she was trying to do, after he’d bared himself to her. This was compulsive on his part. But how could he  _ not _ be compulsive, when his world had gone as mad as he felt? He padded over to the desk. He heard a muted thump behind him, as if Jyn had let herself fall back onto the mattress. The datapad’s heat spread over his palm. The message unfolded -- encrypted -- and absorbed the bottom half of the screen. He sucked a breath through his teeth. He’d expected it to be from Remb, or even from Voya.

Instead, it was from Draven.

“Cassian.”

She’d been right, of course. It could wait until morning, and was explicitly intended to. Draven wanted to see him. He was to report before the start of his regular shift. Well. No more waffling, then.

He walked back to the bunk, and rolled into her arms. 


End file.
